Friday, January 25, 2013

Mayor part of the road crew today

Knox County offices are closed today,
but Mayor Tim Burchett and folks in the Public Works and Engineering
Department are putting down salt and brine on the roads.

Yup, that's right. The big man is out
there, too.

County Mayor Tim Buchett salting roads with Andrew Bivens

The mayor said he couldn't sleep last
night, waking up at 2 a.m. He said what the heck and a few hours
later was riding shotgun with a work crew.

It's good for morale, he said, for the top
boss to hang with the rest of the folks whose work often goes
unnoticed. Plus, he said, it gives him first hand knowledge about
what type of equipment and clothing they might need.

“These guys are away from their
families right now, working 20 hours and we don't thank them enough,”
Burchett said. “When the rest of us are curled up safe in our warm
homes, they're out here in this mess and soup.”

The mayor said he's been tweeting away
this morning and noted that so far he's seen upside down cars, a salt
truck in a ditch and “ambulances and people in a bad way.”

“If you don't need to be out today,
then don't go out,” he said.

Asked so far whether he's had any close
calls, Buchett said he was giving a radio interview this morning when
the truck he was in “got sideways as we were going about eight
miles an hour.”

“I told my guy: Dale Earnhardt
doesn't have anything on you,” he said chuckling. “It was pretty
treacherous. We were right there on a side of a hill with the
potential to roll two or three times before we hit.”

In the meantime, Knox County
Communications Manager Michael Grider might not have gotten the
message that county offices are closed.

“At the office . . . crickets at the
City County Building,” he tweeted this moring.

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the glass is usually half empty

My name is Mike Donila and I'm a reporter with WBIR in Knoxville, TN. I cover government. All politics is local, and mostly ridiculous. Travis Fain of Lucid Idiocy said that. He's a smart guy. This is my blog. The content ranges.